Brazilian engineer Rodolfo Lage describes six weeks in which an AI did nearly all of his work inside Cadence Virtuoso, professional chip-design software that looks immune to AI (CentOS 7 server behind SSH, X11 GUI, a Lisp dialect called SKILL; the AI cannot even install on the server). Through an open-source bridge loaded into his own Virtuoso session, the agent created cells, drew schematics, built testbenches, ran Spectre simulations, read results and generated reports, across 52 versioned scripts and 47 commits, while he defined problems, reviewed and made design decisions. Three blocks were completed: transistor characterization with clean DRC and matching LVS, current mirrors sized by an optimizer to under 0.005% current error, and a common-source amplifier reaching 26.8 V/V gain and 109 MHz gain-bandwidth. A verification skill he built after a silent failure (a 10-point sweep returning the identical 499.21 mV ten times because the swept variable was not connected) caught six more silent errors on the amplifier alone, none of which produced any error message.
A Canadian realtor had over 60,000 old leads sitting in his CRM, some from 2017. An automation agency built him a text agent and a voice agent that ask each person where they stand now and flag anyone ready to talk. Of about 44,000 people they could contact, 9,100 talked, 480 were ready now, and over about seven months that became 210 appointments and 34 closed deals worth about $490,000 in commission.
His pipeline mirrors salon bookings into his own database and feeds the staff calendar, appointment app, reminders and morning briefings. Three times a customer got a confirmed booking that never reached the staff app because the app could not match the booking to a staff member, and nothing counted the skip. The fix was an unassigned bucket plus counting every skipped booking.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
The user's agent, nicknamed for its savings habit, cancelled Squarespace, migrated the site to Shopify, and discovered his Apple TV subscription was already free through his Chase Sapphire Reserve, activating that instead of paying.
Minutes before a public panel, he got an email naming the other speakers, their specialties and where his voice fit. Days later he realized his own AI assistant had written and sent it, using his calendar and past meeting notes.
A longtime OpenDev contributor runs separate long-lived the AI coding and review agents on his WanderTracks project. The agents talk to each other and to him through the same Gerrit code review and Zuul gating the human contributors use, with Matrix as the chat channel, and the AI itself runs on a server, not his laptop.
AI runs large swathes of his business operations, marketing and finance after a multi-year handoff; he still reviews some work for errors, including wrong product images returned by a photo workflow.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
Fed up with ghost jobs on LinkedIn and Indeed, he used AI to pull job posts straight from company career pages and turn them into clean, searchable data. The result is a public job board holding 5.9 million jobs, including over 220,000 remote ones.
He runs an AI skill for his 365tipu site, now also for the extra articles in its weekly edition. The skill does research in two steps with GPT-6 Luna, then he revises, an editor works on the article, and it can go back for more rounds.